the sneaker stuff is relevant because an entire subculture developed around reselling shoes with bots built for it, exchanges developed - StockX is a multi billion dollar company now - and "cook" groups all built around it. Its not new, an article from way back in 2019 talks about it a lot. "Lets cook" (meth) and other terms from Breaking Bad and Mad Men are the seeds of their terminology.
Meet four sneaker-flipping sherpas, each of whom might make you rich—and benefit handsomely themselves, too.
www.gq.com
When 2019 came around and GPUs and PS5s and Switches all became hot, the sneaker groups all moved seamlessly into that market and used the same 300, 500% margins they were used to on these and the bot software that had been perfected to use proxies (to hide IPs), virtual credit cards and multiple addresses (to bypass security) and human checks all worked seamlessly on websites/apps with minimal changes.
They've also now moved into Pokemon cards, MTG, vinyl collector records, Funko Pops, and really anything that can be bought online in extremely limited quantities and resold easily for a vast markup. They coordinate ruthlessly to get as much of the stock of something, i'm in a few "cook group discords" (just shoot the breeze kinda thing, i help out with some coding stuff on one) and for example today Target had a small PS5 drop and there are channels that post success results and I saw people getting 3-10 PS5s each every time. For places like best buy, amazon, walmart, target I'd guess 30-50% of every single PS5 and 3080 drop goes to a bot reseller. One guy posted his ebay logs and he makes around $150k/mo from just reselling GPUs and pokemon cards.
Its a huge problem but it is a bit weird companies don't seem to give a single fuck, Microsoft has started releasing X's to insiders via notification, Sony is doing a few thru PS+ signups, and eVGA has their queue system which is great but the bulk of product is going straight to resellers.
